People

Our group consists of people enthusiastic in developing groundbreaking estimation, machine learning, computer vision and signal processing algorithms for creating accurate and reliable navigation and other methods based on artificial intelligence for sustainable smart cities.

Laura Ruotsalainen, Associate Professor

Dr. Laura Ruotsalainen is an Associate Professor of Spatiotemporal Data Analysis for Sustainability Science at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Until August 2018 she worked at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, Finland, where she led a research group on Sensors and Indoor Navigation. She received her master's degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki in 2003 and doctoral degree in 2013 from the Department of Pervasive Computing, Tampere University of Technology. Her research interests include use of computer vision in navigation, development of sophisticated Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and sensor fusion methods for robust navigation and situational awareness especially in urban areas and for GNSS interference mitigation. Her interests include also development of machine learning algorithms using spatiotemporal data for creating sustainable smart cities.

Her Associate Professor position is a bridge between two scientific networks: HiDATA and Helsus

Ghazaleh Kia, PhD student

Ghazaleh Kia is a doctoral student of the Spatiotemporal data analysis research group at the department of computer science, University of Helsinki. She has completed both her bachelor and master studies in the field of Electrical Engineering focusing on algorithms and Wireless Sensor Networks. Her current research mainly focuses on 5G positioning and cooperative positioning using both 5G and UWB signals for autonomous driving. Ghazaleh’s interests embrace the wide spectrum of computer science including networks, machine learning, programming languages, image processing, algorithms, and databases. Ghazaleh is also interested in sensors and microcontrollers.

Titti Malmivirta, Research Assistant

Titti Malmivirta is a master's student at the department of Computer Science finalizing her master's thesis. Her research concentrates on building a testbed for pedestrian seamless indoor/outdoor navigation based on multisensor fusion.

Samppa Mäkelä, Project coordinator

Samppa Mäkelä (MSc.) is a doctoral student of geology at the University of Helsinki, and works as a project planner for the research group. He is working in a Business Finland Co-Creattion project, Harnessing AI for Safe Drone Society (ADAS). Personally, he is interested in the support structures of scientific research as a whole, and spatial analysis as a specific research topic. His own research is about spatial estimation of widespread geological resources using geographical information systems, a multidisciplinary project in the geosciences.

Co-supervised PhD research

Sergey Nikolskiy is a doctoral student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his master's degree in Applied Mathematics from Saint-Petersburg State Electrotechnical University in Russia in 2005. His current research is focused on GNSS positioning, sensor fusion and maritime navigation. His area of interest includes software GNSS receivers, improving accuracy, detection and mitigation of errors as well as development of spatial data processing algorithms, creation of derivative data products and visualization of spatial data. At the moment he works at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, Finland, in the Satellite and Radio Navigation research group. Before that he had been a software developer dealing mostly with Java and PostgreSQL in GIS-related projects. His PhD research is jointly supervised by Assoc. Prof. Ruotsalainen and PhD Zahidul Bhuiyan from the FGI.

Photos

SDA group at the Indoor Navigation seminar (INTO) 2019 arranged by HiDATA and FGI.